Overfishing

I eliminated fish from my diet last June. The change was inspired by this series of TED talks that is available on iTunesU.

The speakers helped me understand the effects of overfishing on the aquatic ecosystem, and how fish differ from our other sources of meat. We breed and raise our domestic beef, pork, and chicken to sustain the ever-growing population. We don't do that for fish, yet they are placed in the same category as our sources of meat from domestic animals. But wait, what about fish farming? An article from Time Magazine says:

Close to 40% of the seafood we eat nowadays comes from aquaculture; the $78 billion industry has grown 9% a year since 1975, making it the fastest-growing food group, and global demand has doubled since that time. Here's the catch: It takes a lot of input, in the form of other, lesser fish — also known as "reduction" or "trash" fish — to produce the kind of fish we prefer to eat directly. To create 1 kg (2.2 lbs.) of high-protein fishmeal, which is fed to farmed fish (along with fish oil, which also comes from other fish), it takes 4.5 kg (10 lbs.) of smaller pelagic, or open-ocean, fish. "Aquaculture's current heavy reliance on wild fish for feed carries substantial ecological risks," says Roz Naylor, a leading scholar on the subject at Stanford University's Center for Environmental Science and Policy. Unless the industry finds alternatives to using pelagic fish to sustain fish farms, says Naylor, the aquaculture industry could end up depleting an essential food source for many other species in the marine food chain.

Fish are wild animals and our reliance on them as a food source damages the ecosystem. When one link is removed, the whole chain collapses: predators starve and prey becomes rampant. That wasn't the case when only small villages relied on fish populations to sustain themselves. Our village of 7 billion people can't rely on fish populations to sustain us. 

But the solution is so simple: inspire people to abstain from buying fish and from going to Seaworld. They're not necessities. As demand decreases fisherman will catch less, and populations will rebound. The families in fishing communities like Taija will learn to earn money in new ways, just as the families of vinyl, cassette, and CD makers did.

Yes, overfishing was not the main topic of the film. But, the species they focused on just happened to be the most sentient mammal other than ourselves. We kill other aquatic species in similarly barbarous ways, and in greater numbers.